Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a paper at the Digital Dialogues conference in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I may well re-record my talk and release it as a podcast here on Past Thinking, if people are interested.
I won’t be talking about how to podcast, there’s plenty of guides and forums for that, but rather introducing people to what it is, why do it, and who’s doing it, whilst touching briefly on video and vodcasting.
If you’re already going, I’ll see you there, and if you’re not, check back here soon and have a listen.
I urge you to try out the new Celtic Coin Index website. Dan Pett has built the website for this fabulous resource from scratch, and it’s packed with modern features such as Google Maps, RSS, GeoRSS, tag clouds, and even an API (coming soon).
The site is still in beta for the time being. Dan has had just one hour per day to work on this since March, and is pretty much self-taught.
I think you’ll agree, that this new site raises the bar for heritage websites in general.
Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.
By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0″ license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!
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The Museum of London have been doing some great stuff with their website recently, including an upcoming events RSS feed, and the Google Maps powered Map My London where you can record your own memories in London, and where they are of.
Mia has also pointed out that there is now a Museum of London Flickr group as the museum now permits photography. It’s great to see this happening - museums opening up, and encouraging interaction. The Museum’s ‘official’ Flickr account (MoL_Learning - “Molly“) is also well worth a look.
Latest 2 events at the Museum of London (live from their RSS feed):
Horrific XSLT error - mol returned empty - verify /home/pastthinking/pastthinking.com/blog/wp-content/in_mol.xml is a valid XML file and check logs.
Thanks to Mia, I’ve just found out that Past Thinking has been misbehaving itself and displaying an error like a cat proudly presenting a dead mouse to its owner…
The problem was with the theme I have been using, so I’ve enabled an alternative as I won’t be able to fix the problem until Sunday. But people can now see then words, which is arguably much more important than the looks :-)
As computer hardware gets ever faster, and as 3D software gets ever more powerful, new opportunities always present themselves. Crucially, as the ‘average’ home computer reaches a certain stage (where they generally have a 3D accelerated graphics card and a broadband connection) using 3D to explore and interpret the past - interactively - is ever more possible.
Rendering vs Realtime
Most images of the past generated by 3D software packages are pre-rendered. That is, they are static images or movies that you cannot interact with. The reason that you can’t wander about these virtual pasts on your computer, like you can in a game, is that more often than not, it takes a very long time for a computer to ‘render’ the image from the 3D geometry that it is constructed from. Many of the images that I have produced often take hours (even days) to render, having taken days to research and create.
That is set to change, however. Computer games have been exhibiting more and more sophisticated “engines” that produce the in-game graphics. They use the graphics processing unit (GPU) present on modern video cards to the maximum extent. The latest video cards are almost computers in their own right, dedicated to producing ever more photo-real results.
A game called Crysis recently came to my attention. It is (as usual) a “first person shooter” where you roam around a fictitious landscape killing things and performing missions. They don’t usually grab my attention, but this one did for one reason: the graphics engine (CryEngine2) and level editor. The graphics in this game are nothing short of astonishing. What the game does in realtime, 30 times a second or more, would take some software that I use several hours to render. This video shows what can be achieved in realtime, on a computer with the latest video card:
What is even better, is that you can use the same engine not just to play the game, but to create new content (or levels) for it.
Maybe soon, we will be able to use these tools to interpret the past. This kind of technology, if affordable, would certainly speed up the process of creating landscapes and scenes, ultimately allowing archaeologists to experiment with their interpretations in 3D without being detrimental to budgets in terms of money and time. It could allow still images to be generated very quickly, as well as animations, and free-form interactive worlds to wander about in and explore.
Archaeoastronomer and archaeology commentator Alun Salt has recently launched a podcast entitled Clioaudio. It’s based upon current happenings, debates, and controversies in the world of archaeology and heritage.
Tony Gill on the Museums Computer Groupemail list, pointed out a video that covers the major issues that come under the ‘Web 2.0′ umbrella. It puts a lot of today’s issues in context by providing a short history of semantics on the web, and was put created by Michael Wesch, of Kansas State University. Interestingly, he is an assistant professor of anthropology, as opposed to a computer scientist, which is why I think that his interpretation is quite unique.
It is a thought provoking video, accompanied by some suitably electronic music, and well worth the 5 minutes that it lasts.
And when you have finished watching the video, head over to Wesch’s Digital Ethnography website to see some of the reactions, and even video responses. This is a fascinating project to watch.
A superb example of how blogging can work for a museum (or any heritage organisation), is exemplified by the National Museums Liverpool blog.
I visited it a while ago, when it was first set up, hoping that it would be successful. I’m always pleased to see bold experiments with technology in the heritage sector. I couldn’t remember exactly when the blog started (March 2006), so I flicked back in time using the calendar at the top right of the page. Days where content was posted are coloured orange, and I was very impressed to see that this was at worst one post per week. Some weeks went by with a post every day. Great work!
I had a quick look at their blog rank in Technorati, and they’re doing rather well at 148,150, with 269 inbound links from 26 blogs. That’s soon to be slightly increased after I post this..
At CAAUK last week there was some discussion of Adobe PDF files being used to archive and disseminate information, and the dangers of using what is still a proprietary format. It looks like that’s about to change.
Whilst going through my RSS feeds this morning, a story on TechCrunch stood out. Adobe are going to relinquish “control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)”.
Both government and private industry have come to rely on PDF for the volumes of electronic records that need to be more securely and reliably shared, managed, and in some cases preserved for generations.
This looks very promising for those of us concerned with the archiving of digital data. PDF is a good way of preserving the original layout of a report, and doesn’t require the end user to have a copy of Microsoft Office, or to download the behemoth that is OpenOffice.org (even though that is a good idea!).
